Nybsys marks 20yrs of powering Africa’s connections

From a single shop in Gaborone to two decades of national infrastructure across Southern Africa, the homegrown technology company says its mission is simple: Connect the unconnected.

Walk into Botswana Telecommunications Corporation’s (BTC) own flagship shop at Game City Mall in Gaborone and, until recently, you would have met a frustrating surprise. Inside the very building meant to showcase the network, calls would not connect and data would not load.

Then Nybsys arrived

Within hours of switching on a single Nybsys NanoLink base station, the shop had strong, high-speed coverage, clear voice calls and fast data flowing where there had been almost nothing.

The work was carried out by DataNet engineers from Mbabane, the team behind Nybsys’s deployments across the continent, led by project manager Mnqobi Dlamini and coordinated by Yusuf Hassim of Nybsys South Africa. “The network at our own shop in Game City Mall had become a real challenge; our customers simply could not make calls or browse data,” said Project Manager, Botswana Telecommunications Corporation. “With the Nybsys NanoLink base station, we built brand-new coverage almost instantly and gave our customers fast data and reliable calls. We are proud to extend this to as many places as possible  and proud to stand behind a company with African roots.”

Twenty years rooted in Eswatini

The Botswana milestone is only the newest chapter in a much longer African story. For 20 years, the DataNet group and now its global arm, Nybsys, has been part of the backbone of Eswatini’s communications.

The company runs and maintains some of the nation’s most critical systems, including the national 999 emergency response service and the CDAS platform that keeps frontline responders coordinated.

Across the border in Lesotho, Nybsys also operates the CDAS system, and it now adds Botswana to a growing regional footprint. Founded in Silicon Valley, California, in 2012 as the international arm of DataNet, Nybsys has since grown across South Africa, Bangladesh, Singapore and the United States.

Since 2014, it has been building its own cellular network technologies, first earning major success in Asia and now bringing that expertise home to Africa.

Two simple products, built for the realities of the continent

Nybsys’s approach is designed for places where traditional networks are too slow, too expensive or simply never reach. NanoLink is a small, low-power base station for indoor use, homes and offices with little or no signal. You plug it in, connect it to the internet and it creates its own 4G or 5G coverage.

There are no towers to build, no sites to plan and no costly backhaul. Thanks to Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), it sets itself up automatically over the internet.

With studies showing that people now spend up to 80 per cent of their time indoors, the company calls it the most cost-effective way in the world to bring real coverage to where people actually live and work.

MicroLink takes the same idea outdoors. Mounted on the side of a building or even on a streetlamp, this last-mile base station covers a radius of 3 to 10 kilometres. Like NanoLink, it is zero-touch and easy to instal, meaning an operator can light up village after village with very little investment, planning or ongoing cost.

“A technology born in the global south, for the global south”

For the people who built it, the achievement is about more than coverage. “Of the eight billion people on earth, only about four- and-a-half billion are connected — and most of those connections in the global south are still on 2G,” said Moshtaq Ahmed, Founder and CEO of Nybsys.  “No network technology has ever been born in the global south and rolled out to connect its young generation. We are changing that.

A technology designed in Silicon Valley can now be deployed, affordably, in Botswana or Eswatini. As a liSwati citizen, there is no greater pride than working with my Eswatini team every single day to keep that promise and to help build a better nation. Twenty years ago, we began with a simple belief, that Eswatini deserved world-class technology built and run by its own people,” said Mahbubur Rahman, Managing Director of DataNet in Eswatini.

“From the national 999 emergency service to the systems that keep our communities safe every day, our local engineers have shown exactly what they are capable of. Botswana is the latest proof that talent nurtured here in Mbabane can light up networks right across the continent. We are not only connecting people, but we are also building lasting skill and capacity at home.”

“A single cellular base station has nearly 4 000 parameters, and getting every one of them to work together is no small task, especially on brand-new technology,” said Mr. Mqonobi Dlamini, who led the project and implementation with his team from Mbabane. “Working alongside our international colleagues, with direction from our CEO Moshtaq Ahmed and our managing director Mahbubur Rahman, made it deeply satisfying. This is proof that African engineers can deliver world-class networks.”

“For a long time, it felt impossible to prove that homegrown, African technology could truly work,” said Yusuf Hassim of Nybsys South Africa, who coordinated the project. “With vision from Silicon Valley and support from Asia, we are now taking real steps to connect the unconnected. We have plug-and-play technologies that can bring the internet to millions in rural communities, and we lead the world in indoor solutions that need no professional installation. The opportunity ahead of us is enormous.”